“We are becoming an India first company.” Saying this, Google India country manager Sanjay Gupta unveiled a host of features and resources to up the safety quotient of the world's de facto search engine and email service.
The initiative, announced Wednesday afternoon in India, includes added safety features in its upcoming 12th version of Android, the accessibility of Google's Safety Centre in eight Indian languages as well as expanding the company's Trust & Safety teams in the country.
Google also announced educational and public awareness initiatives, including the 'Be Internet Awesome' programme for children, families and teachers which educates young net users on safety measures to be taken while online.
“We are committed to protect our users every day by using the world’s most advanced security infrastructure, treating their data with the utmost responsibility, and giving them complete control over their data,” said Gupta, quipping, “We believe that building a safer internet for everyone is not one more thing to do, it is the one thing to do!”
The moves come in the wake of two post-Covid double whammies – as the pandemic restrictions pushed more and more activities, from work to education to virtually all social life, online, it has also sparked off increased phishing and hacking attempts, often targeted at gullible internet users. A recent report had said that India was the most targeted by cyber attackers amongst all Asia-Pacific nations.
Google's Safety Centre will now be available in Hindi, Malayalam, Marathi, Kannada and Telugu, with three more languages to be added in by the year-end – Bengali, Tamil and Gujarati.
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“Since the pandemic broke, there is a heightened need to strengthen safety and security, reliability and privacy, and the overall resilience of the internet and its applications,” said Vint Cerf, vice president and chief internet evangelist, Google. “In addition to helping users build better digital skills, we need to develop tools to aid them in their quest for safety, so that companies, individuals, researchers, and governments can harness the internet for good, whilst protecting themselves from harm.”
The Google for India initiatives are part of a series of changes being brought in on Google products around the world like YouTube, Search, Location History, Play and Google Workspace. It includes more privacy features, stricter age-appropriate advertisement content, limit advertisement targeting of minors etc. The upcoming version 12 of Google's mobile operating system Android is also expected to focus much on privacy and internet security, and will have features like a privacy dashboard as well as camera and microphone indicators.
